Review: The Hand on the Wall

The Hand on the Wall by Maureen Johnson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I said it from the beginning, after I read all of Truly Devious in the winter of 2018, that Maureen Johnson was planning to stretch out a single mystery novel into a big trilogy. After reading all of this, I'm feeling a lot the same way that I did about Rick Yancey's The 5th Wave - that the second book was filler as hell and totally unnecessary, but that a single large volume comprised of the first and third book would be the ideal presentation for this series. And so it is with Truly Devious and The Hand on the Wall - yeah, forget The Vanishing Stair, but this third book finally wraps up all the mystery in the grand tradition of Agatha Christie. But, again, with Murder on the Orient Express being the primary inspiration, as Johnson deliberately blends climaxes and anticlimaxes and happily turns a few genre tropes on their heads. To the Truly Devious story, I now can finally bid ave atque vale.

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